This essay clarifies quantifier variance and uses it to provide a theory of indefinite extensibility that I call the variance theory of indefinite extensibility. The indefinite extensibility response to the set-theoretic paradoxes sees each argument for paradox as a demonstration that we have come to a different and more expansive understanding of ‘all sets’. But indefinite extensibility is philosophically puzzling: extant accounts are either metasemantically suspect in requiring mysterious mechanisms of domain expansion, or metaphysically suspect in requiring nonstandard assumptions about (...) mathematical objects. Happily, the view of quantifier meanings that underwrites quantifier variance can be used to provide an account of indefinite extensibility that is both metasemantically and metaphysically satisfying. Section 1 introduces the puzzle of indefinite extensibility; section 2 develops and clarifies the metasemantics of quantifier variance; section 3 solves section 1's puzzle of indefinite extensibility by applying section 2's account of quantifier meanings; and section 4 compares the theory developed in section 3 to several other theories in the literature. (shrink)

I argue that, in experiencing a recalcitrant emotion, one does not violate a rational requirement of any sort. Rational requirements, as the expression has come to be used, are requirements of coherence. Accordingly, my argument is that there is nothing incoherent in any way about experiencing a recalcitrant emotion. One becomes incoherent only if one allows the emotion to influence one's reasoning and/or action, in which case one violates the ‘consistency principle’ and/or the ‘enkratic principle’. From the standpoint of rationality, (...) it would even be counterproductive to put subjects under the obligation that their emotional experiences and their evaluative judgements must always fit together. When we nevertheless intuitively sense that the subject is irrational in experiencing a recalcitrant emotion this is in cases in which the emotion challenges the subject's agential identity. However, emotions can, but need not, challenge one's agential identity, and, furthermore, perceptions can do so as well. In any case, challenges of this kind do not involve the violation of a rational requirement. (shrink)

Ecumenical views in metaethics hold that normative utterances express hybrid mental states, states which include both a cognitive and a conative component. The ecumenicist can have her cake and eat it too: the view reaps the benefits of both cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories of normative judgement. The conative component of normative judgements accounts for their necessary link with motivation and rational action. The cognitive component makes it possible for the ecumenicist to endorse expressivism without facing the most difficult Frege-Geach challenges. (...) Ridge (2014) provides a defence of ecumenical expressivism about practical normativity that is both ambitious and compelling. I discuss and try to challenge two (unrelated) parts of the view. In the first section, I’ll raise a question for Ridge’s strategy for addressing the Frege-Geach problem, and in particular his proposed recipe for how to interpret normative assertions of arbitrary logical complexity. Then I discuss Ridge’s defence of cognitivism about rationality. I try to highlight some considerations that make expressivism about theoretical and practical rationality attractive. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the following argument, suggested in the writings of Donald Davidson: if there is such a thing as the given, then there can be alternative conceptual schemes; there cannot be alternative conceptual schemes; therefore there is no such thing as the given.

The starting point of this paper is the idea that linguistic representation is the result of a global process: a process of interaction of a community of cognitive-linguistic agents, with one another and with the environment. I maintain that the study of truth, meaning and related notions should be addressed without losing perspective of this process, and I oppose the ‘static’ or ‘analytic’ approach, which is fundamentally based on our own knowledge of the conventional meaning of words and sentences, and (...) the ability of using them that we have as competent speakers. I argue that the analytic perspective is responsible for five recurring difficulties in truthmaker theory: (1) the lack of attention to the difference of explanatory role between the distinct notions proposed as primary truthbearer; (2) the adscription of purely extra-linguistic truthmakers to ‘synthetic truths’, ignoring the contribution of the linguistic factor; (3) the adscription of purely linguistic truthmakers to ‘logical’ and ‘analytic truths’, ignoring the contribution of the worldly factor; (4) the difficulties in the search for minimal truthmakers; (5) the problems in the treatment of ‘negative facts’ and of other ‘logically complex facts’. I do not provide an account of how to solve these difficulties, but I do show how the ‘process model’ helps to clear up confusion regarding them. (shrink)

The paper argues that dreams consist partly in an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of (...) dreams and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how these aspects are related to each other. These more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical relations and transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and some dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the cleavage between the theory of reference and the theory of meaning, which under the influence of Quine has dominated a large part of the philosophy of language of the last fifty years, is based on a misrepresentation of Tarski's achievement and on an overestimation of the scope and value of disquotation. In particular, I show that, if we accept Davidson's critique of disquotation, the same kind of reasons that Quine offered in opposition to (...) the Carnapian theory of meaning also apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Tarskian theory of reference. (shrink)

This paper evaluates a form of dualism, which is referred to here as the dualism of conceptual scheme and undifferentiated reality. According to this dualism, although reality appears to be divided into distinct things from the perspective of our system of concepts, it is actually not. I justify the view that this dualism is incoherent.

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests, and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands, I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be (...) viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject-matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like. (shrink)

Review of Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s11097-012-9255-1 Authors Dominic Shaw, Department of Philosophy, The University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD UK Journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Online ISSN 1572-8676 Print ISSN 1568-7759.

This article explores the relationship between epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism. It is argued that a fundamental argument for contemporary epistemic relativism derives from the Pyrrhonian problem of the criterion. Pyrrhonian scepticism is compared and contrasted with Cartesian scepticism about the external world and Humean scepticism about induction. Epistemic relativism is characterized as relativism due to the variation of epistemic norms, and is contrasted with other forms of cognitive relativism, such as truth relativism, conceptual relativism and ontological relativism. An argument (...) from the Pyrrhonian problem of the criterion to epistemic relativism is presented, and is contrasted with three other arguments for epistemic relativism. It is argued that the argument from the criterion is the most fundamental argument for epistemic relativism. Finally, it is noted how the argument of the present paper fits with the author’s previous suggestion that a particularist response to the Pyrrhonian sceptic may be combined with a naturalistic view of epistemic warrant to meet the challenge of epistemic relativism. (shrink)

Decision theory faces a number of problematic gambles which challenge it to say what value an ideal rational agent should assign to the gamble, and why. Yet little attention has been devoted to the question of what an ideal rational agent is, and in what sense decision theory may be said to apply to one. I show that, given one arguably natural set of constraints on the preferences of an idealized rational agent, such an agent is forced to be indifferent (...) among entire families of goods, and hence cannot choose among them. This result illustrates the dangers of speaking of the choices of an ?ideal rational agent? when one does not make precise the exact nature of the idealizing assumptions. The result may also be viewed as providing an upper bound on the kinds of idealizing assumptions which can be made for rational agents, beyond which the very concept of choice becomes attenuated. (shrink)

One of the major conflicts in the social sciences since the Second World War has concerned whether, and to what extent, human beings have a nature. One view, traditionally associated with the political left, has rejected the notion that we have a contentful nature, and hoped thereby to underwrite the possibility that we can shape social institutions by references only to norms of justice, rather than our innate dispositions. This view has been in rapid retreat over the past three decades, (...) in the face of an onslaught from several different strands of psychology purporting to show that human nature has a content. In this paper, I argue for a third view: that human beings have a contentful nature, but that nature is uniquely flexible and therefore places relatively few constraints on the shape of our social institutions. Human beings are shaped, by nature, to be cultural animals. We are innately disposed to imitate the behavior of those around us, to a far greater degree than other animals: this disposition toward overimitation allows us to construct local traditions of behavior and thereby to adapt to an enormous variety of environments. These facts, in turn, ensure that human populations live embedded in local forms of life; thus our nature entails that we are deeply cultural animals. (shrink)

Davidson's anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the (...) mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (shrink)

In a series of publications, Eli Hirsch has presented a sustained defense of common-sense ontology. Hirsch's argument relies crucially on a meta-ontological position sometimes known as ‘superficialism’. Hirsch's argument from superficialism to common-sense ontology is typically resisted on the grounds that superficialism is implausible. In this paper, I present an alternative argument for common-sense ontology, one that relies on (what I argue is) a much more plausible meta-ontological position, which I call ‘constructivism’. Note well: I will not quite argue that (...) constructivism is true; merely that it is significantly more plausible than superficialism, and consequently affords a safer route to common-sense ontology. Thus my main goal in the paper is not quite to establish common-sense ontology, nor for that matter to refute Hirsch's argument for it. My goal is, in a way, more expressive than argumentative: I wish to articulate a novel meta-ontological position, one that I take to be in no way obviously less plausible than already familiar positions, and to point out that the position probably leads to common-sense ontology. I open, in section 1, with a discussion of Hirsch's argument and the main objection to it. I then develop, in section 2, a sketch of the alternative meta-ontology I have in mind. I close, in section 3, with the argument that this alternative meta-ontology, too, leads to common-sense ontology. (shrink)

In the sixth chapter of The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel attempts to identify a form of idealism. The position that he deems idealist is that what there is must be possibly conceivable by us. Nagel claims that this position is held by a number of contemporary philosophers. Even if this is so, I justify the view that it is not a form of idealism.

. Neither the correspondence nor the coherence theory of truth does justice to the truth claims made in science and theology. I propose a new definition that relates truth to solving puzzles. I claim that this definition is more adequate than either of the traditional theories and that it offers two additional benefits: first, it provides grounds for a theory regarding the relations between theology and science that may stand up better to philosophical scrutiny than does critical realism; and second, (...) it blocks the move to relativism based on recognition of the plurality of perspectives and the historical and social conditioning of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I advance a constitutive argument for the authority of rational norms. Because accountability to reasons is constitutive of rational agency and rational norms are implicit in reasons for action and belief, the justification of rational norms is of a piece with the practice of reasoning. Peter Railton has objected that the constitutive view fails to defend the categorical authority of reason over agents. I respond to his objections, arguing that they presuppose a foundationalist conception of justification that (...) demands a ground for reason's authority outside of the practice of reasoning. (shrink)

Drawing on writers as diverse as Saul Kripke, Stanley Cavell, G. E. M. Anscombe, Jonathan Lear, and Bernard Williams, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein's key notion of a form of life that explains why Wittgenstein was so enigmatic about it. Then, I show how Hilary Putnam's criticism of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics and Richard Rorty's support of (what he takes to be) Wittgenstein's legacy in the philosophy of mind both require mistaken assumptions about Wittgenstein's idea of a form of (...) life. Finally, I consider the extent to which the idea of a form of life is subject to Donald Davidson's critique of the idea of a conceptual scheme. (shrink)

Alvin Goldman's recent collection (Goldman, 1992) includes many of the important and seminal contributions made by him over the last three decades to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and analytic metaphysics. Goldman is an acknowledged leader in efforts to put material from cognitive and social science to good philosophical use. This is the “liaison” which Goldman takes his own work to exemplify and advance. Yet the essays contained in Liaisons chart an important evolution in Goldman's own views about the relation between (...) philosophy and empirical inquiry. Goldman raises, if only unwittingly, the question of what philosophy per se contributes to the encounter. The way in which Goldman's work problematizes the claim that philosophy forms a working liaison with the cognitive and social sciences is revealed by examining two sets of distinctions prominent in Goldman's analyses in this volume. I trace how each pair of terms—philosophy versus science, individual versus social—is used by Goldman and suggest that it is less clear than one would like how these key notions are or could be distinguished from one another. Doubts about these distinctions, at least as Goldman employs them, suggest more general concerns regarding Goldman's style of naturalism and the status of philosophy as a source of knowledge. Liaisons: philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences , A. Goldman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. (shrink)

I propose to support these replies with actual episodes in late nineteenth and twentieth century physics. The historical record reveals that meaning does change but not in the Kuhnian manner which is tied to descriptive theories of meaning. A necessary part of this discussion is commentary on realist versus antirealist conceptions of science.

This chapter reviews the major contributions of Donald Davidson to philosophy in the 20th century.

Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a (...) Sellarsian account of perception in order to argue that it is not; rather, inquirers can have contingent properties and perspectives that give them access to forms of rational warrant and objective knowledge that others do not have. The universal accessibility of reasons, on my account, is not a precondition for the legitimacy of any actual warrant, but rather a regulative ideal governing inquiry and communication. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...) delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the interpretation of the method of deconstruction in David J. Gunkel’s Deconstruction (MIT Press 2021). I focus on the relationship between deconstruction and truth. I hold that the concept of truth is indispensable for deconstruction since truth introduces correctness conditions for the deconstructive method. However, I claim that truth, being essential and primitive for deconstruction, is fundamentally inaccessible for being analyzed by the latter. ------------------------- Received: 19/10/2022. Reviewed: 13/12/2022. Accepted: 20/12/2022.

Truth appears to be a predicate of sentence-like structures. This raises the question of what a sentence is (or what it is to be sentence-like) such that it is truth-apt. A natural move is to treat sentences and truth-aptness as somehow conceptually or metaphysical coeval—made for each other. This resolution conflicts, however, with now standard approaches in syntactic theory that treat sentences as mere epiphenomena. Siding with the developments in syntax, the paper argues that truth-aptness properly belongs, not to sentences, (...) but to clauses as structures that can be selected by verbs that specify truth-apt states. It is further argued that this arrangement is perfectly consistent with truth-conditional semantics. (shrink)

Although influential in philosophy and relevant to international political theory’s (IPT) key concerns, Donald Davidson has not received commensurate attention in IPT. I aim here to commence filling this gap. I explore Davidson’s insights which fruitfully challenge established disciplinary views. The notions of rationality, objectivity and truth, and, on the other hand, those of intersubjectivity, language and interpretation are often needlessly separated and constricted by seemingly alternative approaches. Davidson firmly reconnects these notions. He helps rethink the realist, strong post-positivist, but (...) also liberal, ‘thin’ constructivist and critical (not thoroughly contextualist) approaches. He bridges the normative cosmopolitan–communitarian distinction. Eventually, Davidson laid foundations for a perspective foregrounding possibilities for rational communication and agreement between very different contexts and also for the non-dogmatic, pluralist and dynamic nature of communication itself. (shrink)

Primitivist theories of truth have been defended by some of the luminaries of analytic philosophy, including the early Moore and Russell, Frege, Davidson, and Sosa. In this paper, I take up a contemporary primitivist theory that has been systematically developed throughout a sizeable body of work but has yet to receive sustained critical attention—Jamin Asay's primitivist deflationism. Asay's major ambitions are to defend a novel primitivist account of the concept truth and to harmonise that account with a deflationary theory of (...) the property truth. I will elaborate a thoroughgoing critique of primitivist deflationism, arguing that we have reason to doubt all of the five theses that constitute the view. Along the way, I will also highlight a number of possible escape routes for the primitivist deflationist, explaining how they can make the view more resilient even as they compel us to rework some of its central commitments. (shrink)

I defend a novel pragmatist account of truth that I call ‘truth from the agent point of view’ or ‘agential truth’, drawing on insights from Hilary Putnam. According to the agential view, as inquirers, when we take something to be truth-apt, we are taking ourselves and all other thinkers to be accountable to getting right a shared target that is independent of any individual's or community's view of that target. That we have this relationship to truth is what enables our (...) practices of disagreement and agreement, even when subject to the glare of self-conscious reflection, and represents a crucial ingredient in our capacity for rational thought. The resulting account shares elements with Huw Price's and Cheryl Misak's views, but also has important advantages over both. It also yields a surprising conclusion—that our best pragmatist account of truth may well be a version of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

This paper argues that radical enactivism (RE) offers a framework with the required nuance needed for understanding of the full range of the various forms of pretense. In particular, its multi-storey account of cognition, which holds that psychological attitudes can be both contentless and contentful, enables it to appropriately account for both the most basic and most advanced varieties of pretense. By comparison with other existing accounts of pretense, RE is shown to avoid the pitfalls of representationalist theories while also (...) allowing us to combine the best elements of the praxeological enactivist (Weichold & Rucińska, 2021 ) and Langland-Hassan’s ( 2020, 2021 ) proposals about pretense, while avoiding their key shortcomings. (shrink)

One of the most surprisingly prominent themes in Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust is the role of genealogical explanations. Brandom sees genealogies or ‘debunking arguments’ as significant because of their ability to deprive our discursive acts of the normative status they require to be genuinely discursive or conceptual. His solution to the problem of genealogy is to offer rationalizing reconstructions of others’ discursive acts, which credit them with normative status. He calls this “forgiveness”. In this paper, I provide some (...) additional conceptual resources to explicate Brandom’s notions of genealogy and forgiveness. These resources allow me to discriminate between two alternate and seemingly incompatible ways of responding to genealogies. One way depends on rationalizing explanations that still attempt to attribute commitments to their subjects, the other avoids making such attributions in favor of explaining commitments only in terms of norms accepted by the rationalizer. I argue that Brandom’s work sometimes promotes the latter response to genealogy but that this tendency should be eliminated from the account. (shrink)

This paper holds the view that although bullshit and obscurantism are obviously related phenomena, they should be kept distinct for conceptual reasons. It shows that whereas phenomena of bullshit tend to concentrate on speech acts and a violation of the expectations of relevance therein, obscurantism betrays an indirect move to confound while promising deep content. After an overview of studies on bullshit and a look at the different characteristics and types of obscurantism, this paper investigates why readers retain interest in (...) reading obscure texts. Interpretive charity, which is one of the reasons for this sustained interest, is found to be unsuccessful in making sense of obscurantism. Obscurantism is thus seen to be a vice more cryptic and systematic than bullshit. (shrink)

Rorty saw the course of philosophy in the twentieth century as an effort to part from two major philosophical trends, namely historicism and naturalism, only to inevitably return at the end of a tortuous path to these very same tendencies. If we can concede without major objections Rorty’s diagnosis of the trends in contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, which seem to reveal the exhaustion of modern philosophy, based as it has been on epistemology, we must, on the other hand, examine (...) carefully the three main questions that this diagnosis leaves open: How does Rorty reconcile continental idealist subjectivism with materialistic behaviorism? Is it really inevitable that philosophy blinded by Geist are unable to question prevalent beliefs? Finally, is the acceptance of a liberalism that is not able to give reasons for itself the most effective and pragmatic liberalism? In answering these questions, it may not be possible to avoid a non-dogmatic, but pragmatic, metaphysics: a vocabulary of vocabularies that allows Rorty to speak of the problems of justice in Plato and Rawls, of the soul in Aristotle and Descartes, of the dystopias in Moro and Orwell. On pragmatic terms, perhaps a modest version of a metaphysic’s “vocabulary” turns out to be as legitimate and practical as any other vocabulary. (shrink)

In Making it Explicit Robert Brandom claims that perspectivally hybrid de re attitude ascriptions explain what an agent actually did, from the point of view of the ascriber, whether or not that was what the agent intended to do. There is a well-known problem, however, first brought to attention by Quine, but curiously ignored by Brandom, that threatens to undermine the role of de re ascriptions in the explanation of action, a problem that stems directly from the fact that, unlike (...) de dicto ascriptions, they permit the attribution of inconsistent attitudes to agents. I propose a solution to the problem which I believe is consistent with Brandom’s approach to the nature of intentionality and the explanation of action. (shrink)

Inspired by Bermúdez’s notion of proto-logic, I would like to fathom what the true proto-logic could be like. But this will be approached only in a negative way of figuring out what it could not be. I shall argue that it could not be purely deductive by exploiting the recent researches in logic of maps. This will allow us to reorient the search for proto-logic, starting with animal abduction. I will also suggest that proto-logic won’t get off the ground without (...) proto-geometry. These negative results will shed some lights on some further conceptual and historical issues around the language of thought hypothesis to arrive at the true proto-logic. (shrink)

The heyday of discussions initiated by Searle's claim that computers have syntax, but no semantics has now past, yet philosophers and scientists still tend to frame their views on artificial intelligence in terms of syntax and semantics. In this paper I do not intend to take part in these discussions; my aim is more fundamental, viz. to ask what claims about syntax and semantics in this context can mean in the first place. And I argue that their sense is so (...) unclear that that their ability to act as markers within any disputes on artificial intelligence is severely compromised; and hence that their employment brings us nothing more than an illusion of explanation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though (...) this ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as ‘normative’ in two important ways. The first way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between actual and correct use. The second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the grounding base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can see our commitment to the ‘determinacy’ of meaning as a practical commitment that structures our linguistic practices rather than a theoretical commitment that merely describes them. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the epistemological status of testimony and the question of what may confer justification on true testimonial beliefs and enable us to call such beliefs knowledge. In particular, it addresses certain anti-reductionist arguments in the epistemology of testimony and their incompatibility with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking) present in the architecture of natural languages. First, the tradition of epistemological individualism and its rationale are discussed, as well as certain attempts (...) within this tradition to include testimony-based beliefs in the body of legitimate and rational beliefs. The next section is concerned with the anti-reductionist approach to testimonial beliefs and some arguments supporting ‘the credulity principle’ grounded in Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense. The last two sections show how the anti-reductionist argumentation is threatened with an insoluble dilemma when considered in the context of languages with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking). Special attention is paid to the justificatory role of egophoric and evidential marking; how these grammatical categories may influence the process of belief formation, and consequently, how this bears upon the nature of justification for testimonial beliefs. The final conclusion of the paper is that the anti-reductionist claim concerning the directness and non-inferential nature of testimonial knowledge is bound to meet objections grounded in the structure of many natural languages. This leads to a paradox: in discussion with reductionism, anti-reductionists do seek support for their arguments in common sense beliefs reflected in everyday language, and, on the other hand, their claims are incompatible with the linguistic data found in a number of natural languages. (shrink)

What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I will first distinguish between three notions of conversation: the trivial conversation (which requires sharing a common language and the meaning of its ordinary expressions), superficial conversation (in which although the language is shared, the communicators fail to share the meaning of (...) their theoretical terms), and genuine conversation (which implies sharing the language and the meaning of ordinary as well as theoretical terms). I will then argue that our real concern with regard to the exchange between Islam and science is to be to specify the conditions under which their proponents can engage in a genuine conversation with each other and that such a conversation to take place essentially requires sharing a common ontology. Following Quine, I will argue that Muslims, like the followers of any religion, would have no other choice but to work from within science. Doing so, however, would not prevent Muslims from having a genuine conversation with the proponents of other worldviews because when the shared ontology fails to offer any potentially testable answer to our remaining questions about the world, the Islamic viewpoint can appear as a genuine alternative among other underdetermined ones, deciding between which would be a matter of pragmatic criteria. (shrink)

Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self-knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson’s account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self-ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation”. It has also been claimed that Davidson’s account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation”. I will (...) argue that not only are these explanations of self-knowledge implausible, but Davidson himself has already rejected them. Thus, neither can be attributed to Davidson as his suggested account of self-knowledge. I will then introduce and support what I take to be Davidson’s official and independent account of self-knowledge, that is, his “Transcendental Explanation”. I will defend this view against certain potential objections and finally against the objections made by William Child. (shrink)

This paper argues against Davidson’s claim that there is no distinction between conceptual schemes and their content and derives the implications for the debate on realism and antirealism. Starting from a semantic conception of realism, I discuss Davidson’s argument against conceptual schemes and untranslatable languages. I argue that the idea of an untranslatable language is consistent since language attribution is essentially normative. Untranslatable languages are metaphysically possible, but epistemically unrecognizable. This leads to a Berkeleyan argument against antirealism: if antirealism is (...) conceived of as dependence from a total language (instead of merely some actual language), the distinction between realism and antirealism vanishes: antirealism is realism. (shrink)

My concern in what follows is to give a comparative report on some important lectures held at the Hegel-Kongreß 1981 in Stuttgart. In discussing the views of Quine, Hacking, Davidson, Putnam and Habermas I want to confront them with some details of Rorty's recent critique of our philosophical tradition. At last I try to give a tentative answer whether there is an end or a turning-point for current analytical philosophy.

Friedman’s perspective on scientific change is a sophisticated attempt to combine Kantian transcendental philosophy and the Kuhnian historiographical model. In this article, I will argue that Friedman’s account, despite its virtues, fails to achieve the philosophical goals that it self-consciously sets, namely to unproblematically combine the revolutionary perspective of scientific development and the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. As I attempt to show, the impossibility of putting together these two aspects stems from the incompatibility between Friedman’s neo-Kantian conception of the role of (...) philosophy and the role of the notion of incommensurability, and the framework of transcendental idealism and the radical character of scientific revolutions. Hence, I suggest that pace Friedman and pace Kuhn’s own self-understanding, the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions cannot be seen as ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’ and consequently we should either abandon the notion of radical scientific revolution or place the Kuhnian account into another, non-Kantian philosophical framework. (shrink)

In their extensive overview of various concepts of presumption Godden and Walton recognise “the heterogeneous picture of presumptions that exists in argumentation theory today”. I argue that this heterogeneity results from an epiphenomenal character of the notion of presumption. To this end, I first distinguish between three main classes of presumptions. Framework presumptions define the basic conditions of linguistic understanding and meaningful conversation. The “presumption of veracity” is their paradigm case. I argue that such presumptions are satisfactorily covered by the (...) Principle of Charity, or else Gricean maxims or satisfaction conditions for speech acts. Formal presumptions are general presumptive rules of argument, theorised as topoi or acceptable inference warrants, including institutional warrants. Material presumptions are acceptable outcomes of nested or outsourced arguments, which entitles arguers to use them as acceptable premises or opinions in further arguments without the typical burden of proof. If this is correct, then the study of presumption always collapses into the study of other, likely more fundamental, concepts. Does it render presumptions, by Occam’s Razor, altogether redundant in argumentation theory? I tentatively answer this question from a consistently conversational perspective on argumentation; I argue that the pragmatic grounds for presumptions are to be found in the conditions for speech act performance in the institutional social world, as developed by Searle. (shrink)

This paper examines Quine’s web of belief metaphor and its role in his various responses to conventionalism. Distinguishing between two versions of conventionalism, one based on the under-determination of theory, the other associated with a linguistic account of necessary truth, I show how Quine plays the two versions of conventionalism against each other. Some of Quine’s reservations about conventionalism are traced back to his 1934 lectures on Carnap. Although these lectures appear to endorse Carnap’s conventionalism, in exposing Carnap’s failure to (...) provide an explanatory account of analytic truth, they in fact anticipate Quine’s later critique of conventionalism. I further argue that Quine eventually deconstructs both his own metaphor and the thesis of under-determination it serves to illustrate. This enables him to hold onto under-determination, but at the cost of depleting it of any real epistemic significance. Lastly, I explore the implications of this deconstruction for Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis. (shrink)

One central argument in favor of perceptual accounts of emotions concerns recalcitrant emotions: emotions that persist in the face of repudiating judgments. For, it is argued, to understand how the conflict between recalcitrant emotions and judgment falls short of incoherence in judgment, we need to understand recalcitrant emotions to be something like perceptual illusions of value, so that in normal, non-recalcitrant cases emotions are non-illusory perceptions of value. I argue that these arguments fail and that a closer examination of recalcitrant (...) emotions reveals important disanalogies with perception that undermine the perceptual model of emotions. (shrink)